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Positioning your ads for the best Results

Many newcomers to Adsense copy the Google ad placement and format and place their Adsense ads on the right hand side of the page using the very familiar skyscraper format.

Although used by Google this is probably not the best positioning and format for achieving a high click through rate. It is the most unobtrusive and hence it is probably why Google us it.

Interestingly Yahoo and MSN take a different approach. The sponsored results (as they call them) are the first things you see on the search results page. This should give you an idea of where to place your ads.

Google themselves provide a web page heat map which identifies areas of a web page that attract the most visitor attention (see below). It looks something like that below:

The red and orange areas indicate the best placement areas for your ads. Google point out, and it is important to bear in mind, that the area of concentration changes as the visitor reads the page.

If the visitor finds the article very informative then he may completely ignore the ads until he has finished the article, and hence ads at the bottom of the page should them perform better.

It is important not to over fixate on the money but to try to please your visitor. The ads when used correctly will ad value to your page if used incorrectly they will just irritate the visitor.

Recommendations For Ad Positions

It is difficult to get it right on every page, and it is too time consuming to experiment on each page. Therefore you need to standardise on a given ad placement. The placement I use and make part of my page template is top left and page bottom as shown in the fig below (ad positions in orange):

This may of course not be the best for you and you should experiment yourself with one or two pages. I do vary the ad placement when I have pages with lots of content and/or pictures/diagrams/illustrations. If the page starts with bullet points or has an header before the end of the ad block then I tend to adopt one of these layouts.

I want the visitor to focus on the content and then the ads and not the the other way around. The reasoning is simple. I may write an article on say "Cascading Style Sheets" which may include references to CSS editors, Syntax etc.

Now there are many tools, books etc that anyone writing CSS could use and the reader may be interested in purchasing one. This is the job of the ads. I could make a list and make some recommendations, I may even do that as well.

The ads however will augment that list and ad value to the page and they have even more value in that they change automatically. They provide, in effect, dynamic content.